Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, who became an international pariah after he fought a brutal decade-long civil war to retain power, was welcomed on Thursday in the capital of Bahrain for an Arab League Council meeting focused on the war in Gaza.
Syrian state media reported Assad and his delegation were received by representatives of the Bahraini monarchy, several high government officials, and Arab League Assistant Secretary General Ahmed Rashid Khattabi.
Bahrain festooned its capital city of Manama with portraits of Assad to make him feel welcome, angering human rights activists who feel the Syrian dictator would look better on a wanted poster.
The Arab League mended its fences with Assad one year ago, concluding his decade of regional isolation, by inviting him to attend the May 2023 Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Assad expressed a few lingering resentments at that meeting, rejecting international condemnations of his many war crimes as unacceptable interference with Syria’s internal affairs and needling Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his incursions into Syria and support for Syrian rebel forces.
U.S. Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, on Tuesday described the “war criminal” Assad’s presence at the 2023 and 2024 Arab League summits as an insult to international order.
“As expected, [Assad] has failed to follow through on any promises he made. In the last year, the regime has deepened relations with Russia and Iran through combined military exercises, displaced roughly 195,000 Syrians through military operations, and fueled the $10 billion global illicit Captagon trade which directly funds the regime’s atrocities,” said Risch.
Captagon is a stimulant that was once favored by Islamic State terrorists, and has since become popular across the Persian Gulf region. Captagon is now Syria’s top export by a substantial margin and, as Risch indicated, the Assad regime profits heavily from the trade. Israeli reports following the October 7 siege of the country by the genocidal terrorists of Hamas indicated that some of the criminals had used captagon before and during the assault.
Thursday’s Arab League summit produced a communiqué calling on the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) to deploy peacekeepers in Gaza and “take clear measures to implement the two-state solution.” The communiqué denounced Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, but was silent on the hideous atrocities perpetrated by the terrorists of Hamas.
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Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart NewsPalestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the United States at the meeting for using its UNSC veto power to prevent the United Nations from unilaterally creating a Palestinian state. On the other hand, he injected some rare criticism of Hamas into the Arab League meeting, complaining that the terrorist atrocities of October 7 “provided the pretext for Israel to attack and destroy the Gaza Strip.”
Abbas said Hamas was playing into “Israel’s interest” by refusing to negotiate a ceasefire agreement.
Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit accused the world of “racism” for refusing to step in and end the Gaza conflict.
“Of course there is a racist factor when it comes to Israel’s war on Gaza. Pure and simple, if this was European blood being spilled then it would have been a different case,” he said.
“If what Israel has done happened in Ukraine, or in Bosnia, or in Kosovo, would the world remain silent the way they are doing so right now with Gaza?” he asked.
Arab League Assistant Secretary-General Hossam Zakki told The National there was a meeting of League foreign ministers on Tuesday that made a “decision on the crisis in Syria.” He offered few details about this decision, beyond expressing a desire to build more “lines of communication” between the Arab League and Syria.
The National described Assad’s participation in the Arab League summit this year as more of an observer role, and saw his appearance as symbolic of slowly but steadily improving relations between Damascus and the other regional capitals:
Embassies started reopening in the Syrian capital after the country returned to the fold. In January, the first UAE ambassador in nearly 13 years took up his post in Damascus. Days later, Saudi Arabia sent a delegation to Damascus to resume consular services, further reintegrating the country into the Arab diplomatic sphere.
Abdullah Munini, secretary general of the Arab Parties’ Conference in Damascus, said the UAE “stood with Damascus in all crises, did not abandon it and continues to provide all forms of support to it”.
The visit of Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Damascus in March last year was a “leap in Syrian-Arab relations and a gateway to the return of these relations to what they were 14 years ago”, Mr Munini added.
The Arab League’s membership seems to have given little thought to how embracing Assad might complicate their task of rallying Western support for a Palestinian state, given that most of the Western world still regards Assad as a monster.
The League was also uncomfortably silent about the captagon crisis, which is killing Arabs in huge numbers while lining Assad’s pockets. Only Jordan mustered any public condemnation of the drug trade, as Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told his Syrian counterpart during the foreign ministers’ meeting to “stop smuggling operations.”
